


Trust Issues

by taylor_tut



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BAMF Peter Parker, Gen, Hiding Medical Issues, Hurt Tony Stark, Infection, Injury, Major Character Injury, Protective Peter Parker, Protective Tony Stark, Sick Character, Sick Tony Stark, Sickfic, Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Whump, injured Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-02
Packaged: 2019-07-23 19:08:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16165067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: A fic from my tumblr in which Tony is injured and tries to hide that fact from Peter Parker, who is also injured, though less severely. Eventually, Peter convinces Tony that it's okay to trust other people every once in a while.





	Trust Issues

Tony opened his eyes to a pounding headache so severe that the sun, despite hanging low in the sky, seared into his eyes. He groaned and sat up—stupid move. Immediately, he could feel that his whole torso was probably one giant bruise and, more concerning than that, a sharp, ripping pain cut through his side so agonizingly that it made his eyes tear up as he fought to be upright. 

“Oh, fuck,” Tony muttered, pressing the chest-armor release and rolling up his shirt to assess the damage. It wasn’t pretty: just as he’d thought, he’d been cut, deeply, from the inner edge of his right-side ribcage to halfway across his back. “That’s not good.”

His rattled brain began to piece together where he was. What had happened? He remembered his objective: he’d been meant to dismantle a giant attack robot that was being not-so-secretly stored on a distant island; no sooner had he landed after leaping from the Quinjet than had the robot attacked from nowhere and struck he and Peter—fuck. Peter. He clamped the suit shut again and forced himself to his feet, waiting for everything to steady itself from the blood loss, the head wound, the dehydration, and scanned the beach with his eyes. 

“Peter!” Tony called loudly, cursing when he heard no response. There was no sign of any life along the beach. What if the robot had taken the kid? How long until he’d be able to get across the island to the side of it that the coast guard patrolled? What if he couldn’t find him? What if—

“Mr. Stark?” a voice called, and Tony took off running into the rainforest after Peter, finding him leaning up against a tree looking dirty, scraped, and in a hell of a lot of pain.

“Pete,” Tony breathed, crouching down right in front of him, “are you okay?” 

“I’m fine; I’m okay,” Peter reassured, gripping Tony’s hands as they probed over him frantically. 

“Are you hurt?” Tony asked, shaking his head before Peter could open his mouth to answer. “Stupid question. WHERE are you hurt?”

Peter hesitated. “I think I sprained an ankle,” he admitted. Gingerly, Tony tugged at Peter’s boot, trying and failing to be gentle and wincing as Peter whimpered in pain. 

“Sorry, kid; almost done; sorry,” he mumbled, trying to be reassuring but probably coming across as panicked. When the boot was finally off, Tony frowned, poking gently at the injury, which was already bruised and massively swollen.

“I don’t think this is a sprain,” Tony confessed. “Looks broken.” Peter sighed irritably. 

“Lovely,” he huffed, looking up for the first time to assess Tony’s own injuries. He’d assumed that since he was up and walking, that he was fine, but Tony definitely looked worse for wear, as scraped and bruised as he was if not more, and exhausted. “Are YOU okay, Mr. Stark?” 

Tony made a dismissive gesture, nodding as if he had barely even considered answering the question truthfully. 

“You didn’t hit your head, did you?” Tony verified, and Peter shook his head. “Good. Alright,” he took a deep breath, ran a hand through his hair and intentionally stopped his fingers before they hit any spot from which they might come away bleeding, “we need to start moving. Rescue is on the other side of the island, and there’s still a homicidal robot waiting for us somewhere in the rainforest.” 

Peter looked uncomfortable as Tony pulled him to his feet. “I’m, uh, not so sure I can walk.” 

Tony rolled his eyes. “Of course you can’t,” he said, as if it were ridiculous Peter would even say such a thing. He turned around with his back to Peter and waited. “Hop on,” he commanded, and Peter obeyed, climbing onto Tony’s back in an awkward too-tall piggyback.

\-------

They only managed to walk for about half an hour before Peter could feel the pronounced tremble of Tony’s legs with every step he took. They’d gotten decently far into the rainforest even in such little time, Tony being uncharacteristically quiet through the majority of the trip, but Peter knew that it wasn’t without difficulty. He could see the strain it was taking on him, especially in heat like this. 

“Mr. Stark, maybe we should take—woah!” Peter began, his train of thought interrupted when Tony staggered to one side violently enough for Peter to climb down off his back and balance between his good foot and the tree Tony had crashed into. “Sit down,” Peter instructed, and Tony obliged. 

“Did I hurt you?” Tony asked concernedly. He seemed lucid, just exhausted. 

“No,” Peter replied, “but I was about to say I think it’s time to take a break.”

“Agreed,” Tony nodded. “My legs feel like boiled pasta.” Peter knew that feeling, and it wasn’t outside the realm of imagination to assume that was why Tony had nearly fallen. Maybe they weren’t boned after all, and Tony might be good after a night’s rest. 

“The sun is going down, anyway,” Peter observed, shrugging off the small pack of meager supplies they’d brought with them. “There’s probably water nearby. I’ll go fill our canteens.”

Tony stopped him with hands on his shoulders before he could stand. “No,” he objected. “I’m not gonna let you hobble off into the unknown with a broken leg and get eaten by a cobra. I’m going.”

Peter frowned. “You carried me all the way here,” he argued, “so you should rest. I can go.”

“I said no, Pete,” Tony fought. Tearing the canteens from his hands a little more roughly than he’d intended, Tony stood and pushed off the tree in the direction of a stream—

—And kept going until he was flat on his face in the dirt. 

“Mr. Stark!” Peter fretted, crouching beside him worriedly. Tony was already regaining consciousness, if he’d even lost it, and his eyes were rolling a little. “Oh my God, what just happened?”

Tony let himself, surprisingly, be manhandled into a seated position. “I’m fine,” he grumbled, “stood up too fast.”

Peter gaped. “‘Fine’ people don’t faint from standing up too fast,” he pointed out, earning a glare as Tony tapped on the arc reactor. 

“They do when they have a weak heart and chronic hypotension,” he countered. “I’m just a little dehydrated. It happens.”

While Peter was skeptical, it wasn’t like there was a whole lot that he could do to argue. Tony was right: it WAS dangerous for him to go out into the wilderness alone injured, and even though Tony was clearly worse for wear, he was presently the only person mobile enough to keep them alive. 

“Okay,’ Peter caved, “but you’ll tell me if you’re not fine, right?”

“Of course, kid,” Tony brushed him off, not making eye contact as he stood, slowly this time, to go fill the canteens. 

=====

Tony’s side was throbbing. Truthfully, he’d needed the break from the kid to just clean out the wound, which he was pretty sure had reopened. Though the suit was doing a decent job of keeping a lot of the pressure off his body, it was quite damaged, so it was only as load-bearing as Tony himself was: which, presently, was not impressively so. 

The stream wasn’t far from where they’d set up camp. That was strategic, of course, like every situation Tony strategically lucked into. Too close to the water would put them in a high-traffic area for animals, but too far, and getting water would become a whole THING, and there was nothing Tony hated more than when things were a THING.

God, were his thoughts even making sense anymore? All he could think about was the pain and the stifling heat of the jungle. His legs felt heavy, like he was trying to walk through mud…

Wait. He WAS walking through mud. Sluggishly, his brain realized that meant he was near water. Tony stumbled to the water’s edge and leaned forward to dip his overly-warm, sunburned face in, only to draw back with a pained hiss as the position tugged at his wound. Instead, he settled for filling the canteen up once and pouring the water over his head, moaning in relief as the cold water soaked his hair, his head, his neck. Now feeling at least a little better, he filled up the canteen a second time, waiting for the water bottle’s built-in nanotechnology to purify the water (gotta love Stark technology) before drinking almost the whole thing in one go. Finally satiated, he filled both his bottle and the kid’s and screwed the caps back on before heading back to where they’d made camp. 

Even if he’d believed his own lie about feeling like shit solely from dehydration and overheating, he certainly wasn’t convinced of that, now. Drinking water didn’t help at all, and hiking back was even more difficult than the hike there. 

\-----

They had to start moving early the next morning so as not to waste daylight, which meant that neither of them had gotten nearly enough sleep and that Tony felt no better than yesterday, possibly worse. 

Tony dragged himself forward, only able to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. He was vaguely aware that Peter was sort of hopping along on his good foot using him as support rather than actually being carried, but the idea of carrying even a single ounce more weight than he already was physically hurt, so he figured that if Peter wasn’t complaining, that he was probably okay for now, and Peter wasn’t complaining, was he? 

Actually, he couldn’t tell. Murkily, he realized that Peter WAS, in fact, speaking. His voice was distant, as if Tony was trying to listen with cotton in his ears. Not only could he not pick out what Peter was talking about; he couldn’t even determine his tone. That was important. The kid might need something, and if he wasn’t available…

“You even listening—?”  Peter asked just as Tony foced himself to cut back into the conversation. However, without keeping all his focus on pushing one foot in front of the other, he stumbled, tripping over one foot that he hadn’t picked all the way up, sending both Tony and Peter hurdling to the ground. 

“Ow, shit!” Peter couldn’t keep himself from cursing as pain ripped through his broken ankle. His vision was doubling from the agony, which was just enough to keep him from noticing that Tony hadn’t gotten back up from the fall until he’d just started to blink awake.

“Sorry,” Tony mumbled, barely opening his mouth to speak, “sorry; you hurt?”

The slurring was insidious. “I’m okay,” Peter managed through still-gritted teeth, scooting over to Tony, who was still on his stomach in the dirt. “Are YOU okay? What even happened just now?”

Tony nodded dismissively, but as he tried to roll over and sit back up, he moved in a way that sent a searing pain through his abdomen and he couldn’t bite back the yelp of pain or control the instinctive jerk that made him double over. 

“Mr. Stark?” Peter worried, trying to flatten him out so he could lie on his back. “Hold still, please; let me look you over.”

“No,” Tony denied, knowing that if Peter checked him over, that he’d find the bruises and the gash in his side. “We’ve gotta get going.”

“Going can wait,” Peter scolded, beginning to put two and two together. “You’re hurt,” he accused flatly. It wasn’t a question, so Tony didn’t answer it. “And you already knew you were hurt.”

Tony sighed, forcing his eyes open to look at Peter hovering over him and finding himself squinting against even the small amount of sunlight that was able to stream through the canopy of trees. 

“It’s not that bad,” he dodged, and Peter rolled his eyes and not in the fond way he normally did. 

“You still should have had me look at it,” he pointed out. “Did you clean it? Bandage it?”

Tony hadn’t done either of those things. Peter pressed the armor release button and waited for the suit to open so he could see Tony’s side, immediately gasping at the blood that had, by this point, soaked through his shirt. Tony braced himself for Peter yelling at him, only opening his eyes when he heard a shaky breath drawn in.

“Why did you let me be an Avenger if you don’t trust me?” he asked, immediately overwhelming Tony with guilt. 

“Pete, don’t do this,” he said. “It’s not about—of course I trust you—”

“If you trusted me, you’d tell me when things like this happen,” Peter argued. And Tony couldn’t fight back, because it was true: he trusted the kid only conditionally; he trusted anyone only conditionally. To ask Peter to take down a bank robber on a school night? Easy. To trust him to still think he’s strong if he showed a chink in the metaphorical armor? That was different. No matter how much he loved the kid, he could always hate himself enough to overshadow his confidence in every single person in his life. 

“There was nothing you could have done,” Tony said, earning a glare.

“I could have figured out a way to walk with a makeshift splint so you didn’t have to carry me,” Peter pointed out, “or at least stitched up the wound so it didn’t get infected.”

Tony frowned. “It’s not infected,” he more hoped than believed, but Peter’s hand pressing to his forehead with a dark expression proved him wrong. 

“I can’t continue to come on these missions if you treat me like baggage instead of a teammate,” Peter said. Tony nodded.

“I’m working on it,” he said noncommittally. Whether it was a dodge or an affirmation, Peter wasn’t sure, but he had to pull himself together either way, so he dragged an arm over his now-wet eyes and took a deep breath to get his emotions under control before speaking again.

“We still need to get to the other side of the island," Peter thought aloud. “How close do you think we are?”

Before Tony had a chance to think about a response, the reason that they’d even come to the island in the first place made itself known by striking an enormous robotic arm down directly between the two of them, tossing Peter several feet back and blinding Tony momentarily with the dust it stirred up.

“Peter!” Tony called, struggling to his feet with a pained groan. Everything was swimming in front of his eyes; the rainforest wouldn’t seem to keep still, but when he finally consolidated the double-picture into one image, he could see clearly that he was looking at Peter being picked up by the robot and dangled by what Tony hoped was his good foot. 

Fuck. He didn’t have a working suit, and he could barely stand. Normally, in a situation like this, FRIDAY would be able to steady him and tell him where to aim: but then again, if they’d had FRIDAY, they could have left this island two days ago. 

Peter could handle some things by himself. In fact, though probably biased, Peter would argue that he could handle MOST things by himself. So when a giant robot plucked him off the ground like a ripe tomato, he didn’t EXACTLY panic, though he didn’t exactly NOT panic. 

“Peter!” he heard Tony shout, seeing him waver upright while trying to take aim with his one undamaged gauntlet. With the fever he’d felt radiating off his mentor just a few minutes ago, he really didn’t like having him aim a weapon in his general direction. 

“Mr. Stark, stay down!” he called. Webbing one of its mechanical legs to the other, Peter prepared himself to drop when the robot released him so it could undo the ties. Hitting the ground with a curse as the pain in his foot sharpened, surely deepening the break, he rushed to Tony’s side just as he fired the gauntlet at the robot, which only served to piss it off. The repulsor blast ricocheted off the side of the metal and back toward them, forcing Peter to dive over Tony to knock him over and wincing at the poorly-restrained cry that escaped Tony. The robot turned its attention back toward them, and Peter scowled. 

“I said to stay down,” he repeated, dodging to the right as an arm tried to swipe him off his feet. “You’re going to get us killed! I can handle this!” 

Tony shook his head. He couldn’t just let Peter, little, young, tiny Peter, face a battle alone. This was just a scratch, just some pain, just—he shook himself conscious as black dots tried to overtake his vision and tried to fumble to his feet once more when his legs became gelatin under his weight and he hit his knees hard in the dirt. Peter webbed himself directly to the bottom of the robot, skimming just above the ground before unscrewing the bottom of the robot’s body and climbing inside its interior. 

“Peter, you can’t—”

“If you trust me, stay back!” Peter poked his head down out the bottom of the robot to shout. Despite everything in his being wanting to say no, to swoop in and save the day despite direct orders not to (something Steve Rogers not-so-affectionately called “pulling a Stark”), he allowed himself to remain on his knees in the dirt and watch helplessly as the robot tried to get to Peter from the outside, poking holes in itself that begun to expose wires, arcing blue and white, and sharp, unfinished metal of the interior. After moments of this, the AI bot realized its method was not working and unscrewed its own top, reaching inside just as Peter ducked out the bottom and tearing out its own “brain.” With a horrible, beautiful sputter, the robot fell lifelessly to the ground. 

Peter hobbled straight to Tony, crouching in front of him, clearly still shaky about the whole battle, what with the whole “going in alone and injured” deal. 

“Pete, are you okay?” Tony demanded, steadying him with hands on his shoulders. His own words were slurring, but he didn’t care about how little everything was making sense right now or how fast everything seemed to be moving, only that Peter had almost died AGAIN and it would have been all his fault and—

“I’m fine!” Peter reassured, the post-adrenaline smile spreading wide across his face. “I didn’t get hurt.”

“Good,” Tony replied. “You were good.”

Peter nodded excitedly. “I learned that from a movie,” he admitted. Tony wanted to ask which one, probably wanted to tease him about his cinematic tastes while he was at it, but suddenly Peter’s mouth wasn’t making words anymore, just a high-pitched ringing noise. 

“Mr. Stark?” Peter asked when Tony went pale and stiff in front of him. “Hey, can you hear me?”

“Good,” Tony repeated, a faint mumble. He pitched forward onto Peter’s shoulder, his burning skin dry, and closed his eyes.

“Hey, no; not yet,” Peter coaxed, maneuvering him with alarming ease to look at the hole that the robot had torn in the skyline with its entrance, a hole through which they could see the other side of the beach and the coast guards and, of all people, Sam Wilson rushing toward them. “Help is here, Mr. Stark, just stay awake,” was the last thing he heard before Peter’s voice went through a kaleidoscope and vanished. 

Everything moved fast after that. There was a blur of Peter handing Tony off to the coast guards, blabbering something about an infected wound, insisting that he not leave Tony’s side and getting his wish when Tony deliriously tried to fight the hands that tried to strap him to the gurney.

And then Tony woke up in a hospital.

Prying his eyes open, he had to assume that he’d been out for quite some time; either that or they’d given him some HELLA painkillers because he wasn’t in nearly as much agony as he’d been when he’d fallen asleep. He groaned anyway, partially for attention. 

“Mr. Stark?” Peter asked quietly, like someone who’d been scolded a few times that day that this was a hospital and there were sick people sleeping and he needed to keep his voice down. “Are you finally awake?”

“How long…?” he rasped, his voice dry from disuse and dehydration. Peter handed him a small cup of ice chips his spidey-senses had told him to get. 

“Just about two days,” Peter shrugged. “Do you remember what happened?”

Tony remembered only bits and pieces, but that might freak Peter out more. “We won,” he replied, assuming that was a safe bet. 

“Yeah,” Peter rolled his eyes, “barely. You passed out the minute we were rescued. They were pretty concerned. We all were.”

Tony nodded. “Was I hallucinating Falcon in snorkeling gear?” he asked, and Peter bit down on a smile. 

“Turns out, they sent someone to look for us when the comms got knocked out,” Peter supplied. “He was not IN snorkeling gear, FYI; he wanted me to make that very clear. It was just a wetsuit.”

Tony nodded. “Sure,” he agreed, changing the subject to the much more pressing matter of Peter’s foot, which was wrapped in a soft bandage and resting next to a crutch leaned up against his bed. “How’s the foot?” he asked.

“Almost fixed,” he replied, “thanks to the healing factor.” 

“That’s good,” Tony said. There was a strange tension, the kind through which he knew he could be in trouble for any number of things but didn’t want to apologize until he knew which option the angry party had chosen. “Penny for your thoughts?” he asked, which resulted in a glare.

“Take a wild guess,” Peter challenged. 

That narrowed it down, at least, to only the most obvious reasons. He could probably pick it out of a lineup now, knowing Peter.

“Hey, I might’ve screwed up, but at least I let you beat the robot alone,” he defended. Peter’s look softened. 

“You remember that?” he asked, almost incredulous. “I mean, like, it was a conscious choice? I thought you just lost consciousness.”

Tony made a vague gesture. “A little of this, a little of that,” he admitted. “But the moral of the story is that I let you handle it?” He really hoped that was the moral Peter had gotten, anyway. Based on the relaxed smile, maybe it was.

“It was a good baby-step,” Peter granted. “Training wheels for trusting people some time before your brain cells are popping like popcorn from a crazy fever.” 

Tony reached out and took his hand, squeezed it hard. “Training wheels,” he agreed. He could probably live with that. 


End file.
